for people who care about the West

Fire and the warming West

An Associated Press story that
ran recently above the page one fold in Billings and Butte, Mont.,
didn't qualify even as a brief in Baltimore, Md. No surprise,
there. More people live in public housing in Baltimore than
populate the states of North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming, combined.
But it was big news on the High Plains that the White House and
House Republicans blocked a $6.5 billion relief package for farmers
and ranchers burned out by the sun, wildfires, or in some cases, by
both. You can't help but wonder what the outcome would have been
had fire blackened the Texas hill country.

Congress'
procedural feint around the relief package was a black eye for one
of the bill's sponsors, Montana's Sen. Conrad Burns, R, whose bid
for re-election needs all the help it can get. On the other hand,
he can't lay all that bad karma at the feet of his fellow
Republicans. In July, as photographs from the international space
station captured a gray blob spreading across all of Big Sky
Country from hundreds of out-of-control wildfires, Burns gave a
clinic on hoof-in-mouth-disease when he accused exhausted Hotshot
fire fighters (who were catching a few winks on the tarmac at the
Billings airport) of being lazy good-for-nothing layabouts.

Spectacular fires are nothing new in the West, but the
fires that raged across Montana this summer were something special.
The upper Great Plains are so dry, and fuel is so abundant, that
helicopter pilots fighting the Jungle Fire southeast of Livingston,
in September, reported seeing flames jump 500 feet above the tree
line. Imagine a ball of fire leaping from the ground over a
building 50 stories high.

Congress may have learned its
lesson about the cost of natural disasters in another century, on
the Mississippi River. In a period of 50 years, farmers living on
the flood plains suffered through five 100-year floods. Flood after
flood, Congress spent billions of dollars rebuilding homes on flood
plains. Taxpayers picked up the tab. Finally, after the devastating
flood of 1993, Congress cried "Uncle" and got out of the
home-building business, once and for all. We're done. No more. And
guess what happened? All those farmers started building new houses
on higher ground.

What does the Mississippi have to do
with the fires and drought on a million square-miles of high, wide
and lonesome? One answer comes from Bob Ruble, an anesthesiologist
who has been running a small horse ranch with his wife, outside
Billings, Mont., for the past 30 years. A scientist at heart, he is
an astute observer of what's been happening to his small patch of
paradise.

"It's going to hell, really fast," he says.
"It's clear that the endemic vegetation can't take the change we're
seeing in climate. The entire region seems to be readjusting to
desert-like conditions, very quickly. It's astonishing, actually."

There is no longer any question that the West we know and
love is firmly wedged between a rock and a dry place. The most
important indicator of just how dry it will be in the coming years
is the moisture content of soil, and according to soil scientists,
those measurements have not been this low since the Dust Bowl era
of the 1930s. Federal climate modelers at NASA say that long-range
climate predictions for the upper Great Plains are ugly as they can
be. Their models make the Dust Bowl years look like a wet season in
the Amazon rainforest.

" knew we were in big trouble when
we measured the moisture content of living trees on our property,"
says Ruble. "It's lower than the moisture level in kiln-dried
lumber. We may be past the tipping point."

Before
Congress pours billions of dollars into the region for relief from
the effects of severe climate change, it would probably like to
know if the upper Great Plains region has passed the tipping point.
But with lessons from another century fresh in everyone's minds,
Congress, for the time being at any rate, seems happy to sit on its
hands and hedge its bets.

Paul VanDevelder is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is the
author of Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes and the
Trial that Forged a Nation, and he lives and writes in
Corvallis, Oregon.